The Camping Trip that Wasn't

What a bummer of a weekend. We met at our friend's house Friday afternoon and headed to Joshua Tree National Park driving in three cars, arriving around 3:30. We drove to the site we camped at last time to find every camping site taken. This was worrisome since this is usually the last of the camp sites in the park to fill up. So we drove to the next closest camping area, where we found two open sites, but they were small and not next to each other. We needed two since we had more than two cars, and were expecting three more cars on Saturday. Joshua Tree has about eight group of camp sites throughout the park, and after driving though the other three that were near by, we found that they were all full. This was not good. So we drove to the other entrance and talked to the range in the booth. He couldn't really do anything, but did agree to give us our money back and said there was an "overflow" site outside the park. By the time we arrived there, it looked like most of the site were empty, but there was a list on the range station with a list of reserved sites, and they were all reserved for two nights. We drove around and saw the sites with the reservations, and even though it was already 6 PM, only about 10% of the sites had people at them. We agreed to give up and go back to the Desert Hot Springs, where we ended up spending the weekend not camping, just hanging out and listening to music. On Saturday, two more people showed up, since we were celebrating a friend's 50th birthday, which is actually this Tuesday. I ended up leaving this morning and got home by the halftime of the Chargers game. After the game was over, I took a long nap because I didn't sleep well last night. Sleeping near the kitchen is a bad idea since that is the first place everybody goes when they wake up at five AM realizing they forgot to eat dinner and they are hungry.